A whole new field known as quantum biology

For most people, science deserves its reputation for being opposed to religion.

I’m not thinking of the rather noisy campaign by a handful of die-hard atheists to demote and ridicule faith…

Despite the noisy atheists, two trends in spirituality and science have started to converge.

Are the noisy atheists any more noisy than Deepak Chopra himself? He’s not particularly shy and retiring, now is he. It’s my understanding that he makes quite a lot of money by writing quite a lot of books that talk raving nonsense – like about “spirituality” and science starting to converge.

It is becoming legitimate to talk of invisible forces that shape creation – not labeling them as God but as the true shapers of reality beyond the space/time continuum. A whole new field known as quantum biology has sprung up, based on a true breakthrough – the idea that the total split between the micro world of the quantum and the macro world of everyday things may be a false split.

33 Responses to “A whole new field known as quantum biology”

Complete BS. Biology if anything is about avoiding quantum uncertainty. There is no biological process that I know off that uses or takes into account “quantum” phenomena unless you take into account brownian motion or photoreceptors. And even then biological systems goes through great rigmaroles to remove any uncertainties.

So I did a little Googling on “quantum biology”… I’m not quite sure what to make of it yet. It turns out that quantum effects are important in some biological processes (see the Wikipedia article on quantum biology) but most of the hits I found regarding that specific term were either pure woo-woo, or else discussing dubious ideas such as that the human brain might be a quantum computer. (We can more or less dismiss this idea out of hand, based on just how damn hard it is to keep a qubit from decohering. It is simply not plausible that natural selection could have produced a mechanism that could successfully do this. Of course, it’s not an impossible claim, so extraordinary evidence could change my mind… but absent that, it’s a rather silly idea.) In any case, calling quantum biology a “field” appears rather grandiose. I’d call it more of a concept than a field, at least at this point.

As regards poor Deepak here, he’s still making no damn sense. First of all, even if some of the more outlandish claims of so-called quantum biology were true, what the hell does that have to do with spirituality? Because quantum mechanics is counter-intuitive? And counter-intuitive = mysterious = Jeebus? That’s just frikkin’ bizarre.

Moreover, check out this phrase: “the idea that the total split between the micro world of the quantum and the macro world of everyday things may be a false split.” Well duh. There’s a reason nobody’s ever been quite completely satisfied with the quantum mechanical interpretations that involve concepts like “waveform collapse”. It’s been obvious all along that it was an artificial split, imposed because the macroscopic laws just work so damn well virtually all the time, and they are much easier to work with.

If I had wrote “the idea that the total split between the relativistic world of the very fast and the Newtonian world of the slow may be a false split”, you’d (rightly) call me an ignoramus. Nobody is positing a total split! It’s just that Newton’s laws are more convenient and work just fine until you start going really fast. The definitions of “just fine” and “really fast” of course depend on what level of precision you need — they are fuzzy. There is no “total split”, and that’s just patently obvious.

Personally, I think a lot of this confusion about the spooky effects of quantum mechanics can be resolved by gaining at least a lay intuitive understanding of quantum decoherence. Sometime last year I started to get a handle on exactly what that meant, and how it could create the appearance of phenomena like waveform collapse without having to invoke anything weird or spooky. (Well, nothing weirder than parallel universes or quantum fields)

It also will tell you that Deepak is total full of it here (of course, one could also know that because Deepak is pretty much axiomatically full of it) because outside of carefully controlled laboratory conditions, the time it takes for quantum decoherence to take place is on the order of picoseconds — and it couldn’t really be any other way. So while it is true that this mythical “total split” between the quantum and the macroscopic is completely artificial, you don’t really have to worry about quantum-like effects in everyday life.

Although I do wonder, if we cut two narrow slits in a screen, and repeatedly throw Deepak Choprah at the screen, will it create a wavelike or particlelike interference pattern? We should find out!

The problem is that Deepak Chopra reads like a parody of Deepak Chopra.

As for the brain being a quantum computer, we have a pretty good idea how the brain works at a cellular level, there is no need to involve quantum mechanics beyond the interaction between standard chemical and electrical interactions.

Deepak is the king of quantum woo. There is, apparently, a biological process involving the quantum-mechanical effect “quantum tunneling,” a subject I have been researching, but I can’t find the cite for it. Here is the applicable mention (but it should in no way be conssidered support for quantum woo). I’m providing it for information only.

“Quantum tunneling is involved in many physical processes, such as radioactive decay and the nuclear fusion that takes place in the Sun. It is also used in certain electrical components, and it has even been shown to occur in enzymes in biological systems. For example, the enzyme glucose oxidase, which catalyses the reaction of glucose into hydrogen peroxide, involves the quantum tunneling of an entire oxygen atom.”

One of my favorite debates ever is still when Michael Shermer and Sam Harris debated Chopra and Jean Houston. It’s amusing to watch the great “spiritual teacher” lose his cool at Shermer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8-Yxdphsg

Y’know, I’m pretty sure I could write a nice little Markov chain generator that would generate text that looks an awful lot like this. And which would be no less meaningful, nor coherent.

And apparently, based on Chopra’s experience, I could get pretty seriously rich with such a thing. Click a button, it writes one for you, sends it to you in paperback or cloth, and bills your credit card appropriately.

By ‘die-hard’ and ‘noisy’ I think he means rational. Damn atheists and their rational arguments, so inconvenient when you’re try to sell rubbish.

Since consciousness is still very much unexplained, there is actually no such convergence going on between science and spirituality.

“Agree or disagree, you cannot simply toss the question out the window.”

Yes I can, because the question is stupid, and not based on already known facts like: consciousness is a process of the brain and not atoms or molecules. The question is not an argument either, and nothing in that article amounts to any actual rational argument, only wishful thinking.

You know, I was wondering that! What the hell is Chopra doing at the Gallup Organization and what on earth is he supposed to have to do with science?! I take this personally; the Gallups are cousins of mine.

“Chopra joined Gallup as a Senior Scientist in 2005. He is one of the world’s leading living authorities on “connectedness” and is leading Gallup’s research and discovery on how one-to-one relationships affect peace throughout the world.”

I personally like the quotes they put around connectedness, maybe they don’t what he does either. If he is a leading scientist in the area where are the publications? They give an ‘impressive’ list of titles, eg The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence (does this translate to Fiddling with Yourself: Because It’s There?), but a bit short on peer-reviewed anything.

I dislike Chopra more than most woo peddlers, and not because I believe him to be a con man (I don’t think I do). He’s just made of smug. He actually thinks of himself as a “sage.”Even physicists can’t convince him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

There’s evidence of fundamental quantum effects in some biological systems including photosynthesis and possibly ‘compasses’ in birds interacting with the earth’s magnetic field.

An interesting example is photosynthesis by bacteria living deep in the ocean “where the sun don’t shine”. So the first interesting aspect is that in the near absence of sunlight that the bacteria do photosynthesis using photons from the tail of the black body spectrum that Planck was first to successfully explain by inventing the photon at the dawn of quantum theory. What’s really interesting is how the architecture of the light receptors harness the photons with remarkable efficiency best described by the irreducible superposition characteristic of quantum mechanics, “entanglement”, at the forefront of current applications of quantum computing and communication. There’s no ‘woo’ here: this is hard-nosed and fascinating science with agreement between evidence and theory. And evolution produced this mechanism.

I propose a Corollary to Godwin’s Law: The less a participant in a discussion actually knows about real science, the more likely they are to use the term ‘quantum’. And I suggest that articles and responses using the word outside the specialised area of nuclear physics be automatically consigned to the bit bucket — before publication if possible.

I thought I was die hard since I say Yipee Kai-Yay MF a lot. I just don’t eat enough dog biscuits to be a lethal weapon atheist.

I would add that Deepak’s Choprawoo has revealed that he possesses a quantum of knowledge, in the literal sense of the word. Maybe some enterprising physicist can make him famous by naming an infinitesimal particle a Chopra, in recognition for how much sense this con-artist makes.

That lecture by Seth Lloyd was incredibly irritating, and more about plugging a book that is equally irritating. The only useful part of the lecture was that Seth Lloyd admits he does not understand quantum mechanics. Most of the lecture was filled with anecdotes, bad jokes and name dropping.

There is much about quantum biology in Jim Al-Khalili’s book ‘Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed’ (Phoenix, 2003). Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist with, according to the blurb on the book and other sources, an excellent reputation.

As one of the perplexed myself, I was interested in a couple of pages in this book entitled ‘Quantum Mechanics and Biology’ by Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Surrey. Among other things he writes “The living cell is nature’s nanotechnology. Just as engineers and physicists working at the nano-scale level must include and exploit quantum mechanics in their models, so evolution over three billion years must have incorporated quantum dynamics. Quantum mechanics is likely to be as fundamental to life as water. Indeed, recent experiments and simulations indicate that protons involved in hydrogen bonding in water are highly de-localized (that is, in a superposition of being in two separated locations). Hydrogen bonding is probably the most fundamental biochemical interaction, involved in DNA base-pairing, enzyme catalysis, protein folding, respiration and photosynthesis. If quantum delocalization lies at the heart of this phenomenon then it is central to life.” And that was published in 2003!

I read almost any recent book or paper I can on evolution and related subjects, though I am not an evolutionary biologist (or, emphatically, a creationist). What comes across more than anything else is that there is a very wide range of opinion about evolutionary mechanisms that are often described as indisputable facts: much “I am right and everyone else is wrong” compared with most fields of human endeavour. Topics such as epigenetics and quantum biology are often not even in the indices – perhaps implying that ‘lay’ people like me should not even think about them. Sometimes “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“Topics such as epigenetics and quantum biology are often not even in the indices”

Epigenetics is a very real subject and may very well provide some important insights into some aspects of evolution so I wouldn’t rule it out just yet. As for quantum biology, I’m not so sure. I work in molecular genetics and there is virtually zero talk about quantum biological effects in my field – all the major phenomenon we see seem to be adequately explained by standard (non quantum) physics and chemistry.

Well, I had a look at Salty’s youtube clip…. The guy’s a con, straight up. Why should anyone question this? He uses language in inappropriate ways to sound profound, and yet he makes no sense. Isn’t this a con?

New Scientist has a page that reports on the latest misuse of the term ‘quantum’-usually by people trying to sell some snake oil product. I wouldn’t be surprised if even some scientists were guilty of inappropriately sprinkling some quantum pixie dust on their research.

I’ve wondered what happened to the post modernists, apparently they’ve taken refuge in ‘quantum biology’.

@25 Eric,

yes,of course it’s a con,otherwise known as ‘religion’or ‘spirituality’.

What makes Chopra’s case worse is that he has been corrected now for more than 15 years on these matters (the gratuitous and incorrect use of quantum mechanics). Either he’s an out-and-out charletan, or he’s *really* self-deluded.

Indeed, indeed. Yet another characteristic that separates those who proceed in good faith from the out-and-out con-artists: How do you behave when you’ve been proven wrong? Do you gracefully acknowledge the error and vow to do better next time, or do you gleefully skip down Denialism Road with your fingers in your ears? For me, this is what makes it so obvious that people like Ray Comfort and Chopra are purposely trying to fool people as to what’s true and what’s not. Facts and evidence mean nothing to these morons—that’s something you really have to take an extra moment to let sink in—nothing.

For example, the enzyme glucose oxidase, which catalyses the reaction of glucose into hydrogen peroxide, involves the quantum tunneling of an entire oxygen atom.

Unfortunately, the pop-sci piece which makes this claim — “10 strange things about the universe” — definitely deserves a [citation needed] tag. (It’s a sloppy piece besides — the “antimatter retrocausality” section set my teeth on edge, by presenting a cockamamie idea of Wheeler’s from the 1940s and ignoring advances in understanding made since then. The section on Gödel fails to mention that an axiom system can be both complete and consistent if it lacks the power to model Peano arithmetic, etc. This is what you get when you learn all your science and mathematics third-hand, from other people making lists and writing books about the ten weirdest things in science.) Anyway, I’ve seen some chemistry papers talking about quantum tunnelling as another way to cross energy barriers (in addition to thermal excitations) — it’s interesting, but not actually that weird. People have been building transistors which make use of quantum tunnelling for years!

The article cited by Wikipedia to support the “whole oxygen atom” claim doesn’t seem to support it. It’s not my field, so I could be missing something, but all I’m seeing are references to tunnelling of electrons, protons or hydride ions.

Remember: Linus Pauling introduced quantum mechanics into chemistry in the early 1930s. His great triumph was explaining the structure and stability of the benzene molecule. Chronic benzene exposure causes leukemia and headless babies. Spiritual? Perhaps not.

There solid science / empirical evidence behind quantum biology, supporting it as an emerging field. Don’t fall victim to conflating Chopra’s b.s. with the actual scientific data. To offhandedly dismiss the empirical evidence supporting quantum biology with chopra’s sensationalism would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And (by the way) I’m having great difficulty understanding why the default position of so many self proclaimed atheists is an a priori rejection of anything quantum involved in biology (more myopic conflation?). Wtf does theism have to do with quantum effects in biological systems?